The Girls Shredding the Bronx
Before they met in 2020 via a flurry of Instagram DMs, skateboarders Kava Vasquez and Mel Ramirez were already in each other’s orbit, two planets circling the same concrete suns. Each had spent the majority of her life in the Bronx and, in recent years, started to skate it: tracing the contours of pavements and asphalt cracks, getting pummeled into scaffolding or splayed across stairs, glimpsing euphoria — or the closest thing to it — cruising the world on four urethane wheels.
“I remember seeing you for the first time and thinking, Oh wow,” Vasquez, 29, tells Ramirez, 26, during our Zoom call, her blue-dipped braids filling the frame. “I’d always been a tomboy and had this weird relationship with my femininity. I thought it was cool how you’d wear your sparkles in the park — it was refreshing to see someone unapologetically claim their womanhood in this space. I was like, man, she’s the only girl I’m consistently seeing here, and she’s got this squad of guys encouraging her.”
Vasquez knew back then, as Ramirez did, that while the city’s skate parks promised freedom, it was historically harder won for those on the fringes. So many of the guys who would zigzag freely across the park’s weathered obstacles, or fly in the streets beyond them, had been skateboarding from a very early age, being rewarded for their physical daring — and the scraped-up flesh that proved it. Vasquez recalls that even as a pretty tenacious, adventurous kid, much of her childhood was spent “being reminded that there’s a limit to what’s possible.” Girls weren’t shepherded toward skateboards in the same way boys were, often coming to it in their late teens or early 20s. (Even when Ramirez, a former Tae Kwon Do instructor, began skating five years ago, her mom yelled at her for “busting my butt” on a cruiser.) “There’s a lot of vulnerability when learning in public, when everyone around you has been socialized to underestimate you,” continues Vasquez. “And then we’re socialized to underestimate ourselves, especially physically. On top of that, the guys have been skating for so long that you feel you’ll never catch up.”
When Vasquez finally reached out to Ramirez after repeatedly crossing paths, it was with a business proposition. She wanted to be friends but also to build a local collective together, a nonjudgmental community where femme and queer skaters might meet friends and hone their skills together. Ramirez, it turned out, had flirted with a similar idea. “It’s funny, but I’d never thought of having someone else to start this with,” she says. “I realized it would be nice to have someone as strong as Kava to help.”
The following photographs, taken by Avery Norman in late 2023, document Bronx Girl Skate founders Ramirez and Vasquez along with a handful of their teammates at Playground 134. Their collective currently sponsors about ten athletes, hosts an annual anniversary party and a Summer Skate Jam, and runs inclusive grassroots skate events with brands like Nike SB and Bones Bearings. Later this year, they will record and release the organization’s debut skate video. “For girls coming in now,” says Vasquez, “I think groups like us, Sk8Babes, Environmental Hood Restoration, and PANSY, plus the Harold Hunter Foundation, are all finding different ways within New York’s skating ecosystem to make it more welcoming to people of different backgrounds. For us, that landscape didn’t exist until we created it.”
Elisha Gelin, a BXGS member based in Yonkers, found herself gravitating toward Vasquez and Ramirez even before they founded the collective. “We’d often skate at the same parks. We found comfort in each other,” Gelin says.
Now 27, Gelin got on her first board at 19 years old, when her best friend, Larissa De Oliveira — also a BXGS athlete — loaned her a spare while they were visiting a friend in Pennsylvania. “When I started skateboarding in the Bronx, it was a male-dominated sport. I was often the only girl at the park if I didn’t intentionally plan to go with a group of friends,” she says. “Further, the men weren’t particularly supportive of female skaters. I often felt judged, like I didn’t belong there or as if I was taking up someone else’s space by just existing in the park.” Over the past few years, Gelin has noticed a shift in this dynamic. She thinks it’s due in part to groups like BXGS, which crack open street corners and whole parks, making shared spaces less isolating and more alive.
Skateboarding’s acolytes have long collided with urban planning and social justice, reshaping neighborhoods so people can better soar inside them. The BXGS founders follow in this tradition: Both are deeply embedded in their community, developing resourcing for underfunded, underrepresented skateboarders in the Bronx and beyond. Last February, Vasquez worked with Christopher Ricardo Blandino to co-produce Caras Del Skate Festival in the Dominican Republic. Ramirez, who is Mexican American, visits Puerto Rico often to support her boyfriend, Nicholas Ramos, at Manny Santiago’s annual skate contest, Prince of Puerto Rico. “We’re grateful for the opportunities and resources we get,” says Vasquez, “whether it’s to feed people or give products to kids whose boards are chewed up at the park. Empowering the most marginalized people ultimately uplifts the whole.”
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Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the site where the collective gathers was called Playground 137, and that the acronym for the collective was “BGS.”
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